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After six months of work, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has indicted two advisers to President Trump and accepted guilty pleas from two others in exchange for their cooperation with his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election — a sign of mounting legal peril for the White House.
With the guilty plea Friday by former national security adviser Michael Flynn — one of Trump’s closest and most valued aides — the investigation has swept up an array of figures with intimate knowledge of the campaign, the transition and the White House.
It appears to have swiftly expanded beyond Russia’s interference in the campaign to encompass a range of activities, including contacts with Russian officials during the transition and alleged money laundering that took place long before Trump ran for office.
And Flynn’s agreement to fully cooperate with investigators suggests that Mueller is not done yet.
Both Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, acknowledged lying to the FBI about their contacts with the Russians. Now, both are cooperating with Mueller, according to prosecutors, potentially providing evidence against other Trump aides.
“Mueller has proceeded with professionalism, deliberation and without delay to build a case with a wall of substance,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, who was a lead member of the Watergate special prosecution team. “This plea today is another brick in that wall.”
Mueller has moved so swiftly that it has left Trump’s team grasping for answers about how far the probe might ultimately reach.
Along with Flynn and Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, have been charged with money laundering and other crimes related to political consulting they did in Ukraine prior to joining Trump’s effort. They pleaded not guilty.
On Friday, the news about Flynn’s deal broke after the regular senior staff meeting at the White House, startling top officials and leaving many feeling helpless.
“We don’t know really what is going on,” said one adviser who speaks to Trump often and requested anonymity to describe private conversations. “Who’s it going to implicate? What are they going to say?”
Flynn’s cooperation poses particular risks for the White House.
[Timeline: What Flynn copped to — and what he didn’t]
Unlike Papadopoulos, who had minimal contact with top aides and met Trump just once, Flynn was a key member of Trump’s inner circle, considered at one point for the vice-presidential nomination.
There have been signs for months that Trump was particularly nervous about the possibility of the investigation ensnaring his former national security adviser.
Former FBI director James B. Comey testified in June that Trump urged him in February to back off an investigation of Flynn. Their one-on-one conversation in the Oval Office came three weeks after Flynn was interviewed by FBI agents and lied about his foreign contacts.
If anyone on the campaign coordinated with the Russians in their efforts to interfere with the election, Flynn would probably have been aware.
Court documents filed Friday show that Flynn did not operate independently in his contacts during the transition with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — which he then lied about to federal agents.
According to the filings, Flynn consulted with multiple senior Trump officials during the transition. One adviser, described in court documents as a “very senior member” of the transition team, directed Flynn in December to reach out to Kislyak and lobby him about a United Nations resolution on Israeli settlements.
People familiar with the investigation identified the adviser as Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner lawyer Abbe Lowell declined to comment.
Likewise, Flynn spoke to Kislyak about new U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia by President Barack Obama in late December only after discussing the matter with a senior Trump official who had accompanied him on a trip to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, according to the documents.
The senior official was Flynn’s deputy, K.T. McFarland, according to two people familiar with the conversation. McFarland, who has been nominated to be ambassador to Singapore, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mueller is now expected to explore who knew what in the White House about Flynn’s interactions with the Russians — and whether any other Trump aides lied about that knowledge.
Legal experts said Mueller could be looking at whether Trump’s team violated a more-than-200-year-old law known as the Logan Act that prohibits private citizens from working with foreign governments against the U.S. government.
Court filings show that Flynn was actively working to undercut Obama’s foreign policy before formally entering government, in consultation with other Trump officials.
“It sure looks like this is a Logan Act violation,” said Stephen Vladeck, an expert in national security law at the University of Texas.
Still, use of the Logan Act, which has not been used to prosecute a U.S. citizen since the Civil War, would face strong legal challenges.
The constitutionality of the law — particularly whether it imposes unacceptable restrictions on freedom of speech — has never been tested. Vladeck also said defense lawyers could argue that presidential transition officials act with the authority of the U.S. government and are not subject to the law.
But Mueller has shown a willingness to be aggressive when it comes to using obscure federal statutes, as seen in his use of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is rarely prosecuted in criminal cases. Mueller charged Manafort and Gates with violating that law.
Aside from the legal implications, Flynn’s account could ratchet up the political pressure on the White House, which will now face more questions about why incoming Vice President Pence, chief of staff Reince Priebus and then-spokesman Sean Spicer insisted that Flynn did not discuss sanctions with Kislyak when other senior officials knew otherwise.
At the time of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador, Obama was weighing how to respond to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered hacking and propaganda operations to help Trump win the White House.
In those same weeks, Obama’s team had been discussing what to do about the failure to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. That question abruptly required an answer on Dec. 21, when Egypt unexpectedly introduced a U.N. Security Council resolution criticizing Israel for its West Bank settlements and called for a vote the next day.
On both issues, the policies chosen by Obama ran counter to those preferred by Trump and his team.
But long-standing U.S. tradition, supported by the Logan Act, has held that a president-elect take a back seat to the serving president until after taking the oath of office.
On Dec. 28, Obama announced the expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence officials from this country and the closure of two Russian diplomatic facilities as punishment for what U.S. intelligence said was Moscow’s interference in the election.
The next day, Dec. 29, court documents show that Flynn called Kislyak and asked that Russia avoid escalating tensions with the United States and refrain from responding in kind to Obama’s actions. Just one day later, Dec. 30, Putin announced that he would take no action, prompting Trump to tweet that Putin had made a “great move.”
“I always knew he was very smart,” Trump tweeted.
In mid-February, four days after The Washington Post reported that Flynn had discussed the sanctions with Kislyak, Trump fired him.
But the new court documents show that some Trump aides had been aware of the nature of Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador. He spoke to other aides before and after the conversation with Kislyak on Dec. 29, as well as after a conversation he had with Kislyak on Dec. 31 in which the ambassador said Putin had decided not to retaliate specifically in response to Flynn’s request.
Events surrounding the Dec. 23 Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements as illegal marked the most overt interference in U.S. foreign policy by the Trump team, and Trump personally, between his election and inauguration.
Egypt’s abrupt introduction of the resolution on Dec. 21 — and the scheduling of a vote for the next day — took much of the council, and the Obama administration, by surprise.
As Obama consulted with aides on the U.S. vote, Israeli officials mobilized to head off passage. Trump’s position was the same as Israel’s: The resolution should be vetoed, he tweeted before dawn on Dec. 22.
According to court documents, that same day, the senior official directed Flynn to contact foreign leaders, including from Russia, and urge them to do what Obama had decided the United States would not: oppose the resolution or at least delay it. Trump himself called Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to discuss the resolution, the Egyptians announced at the time.
At first, Trump’s gambit appeared to have worked. Just before the vote was to take place, Egypt withdrew the resolution. But by the next morning, it had been reintroduced by New Zealand and other co-sponsors, and a vote was quickly held. The United States abstained, and the resolution was adopted with the vote of all other 14 Security Council members.
Trump publicly fumed, tweeting, “We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect.”
Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey and Jenna Johnson contributed to this report.
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The Senate passed legislation to overhaul the tax code early Saturday morning, handing Republicans a badly needed legislative and political victory.
Senators voted 51-49 to pass the plan, capping off days of debate and hand wringing as leadership worked frantically behind the scenes to win over holdouts and get the proposal in line with the chamber’s rules.
Republican Sen. Bob CorkerRobert (Bob) Phillips CorkerSusan Collins is swing vote on tax bill Top GOP senators say they have the votes to pass tax bill Angus King on GOP tax push: ‘To call this a circus would be an insult to circuses’ MORE (R-Tenn.) bucked party leadership and voted against the plan amid lingering concerns over the impact on the deficit. No Democratic senator supported the legislation, with Democrats quickly leaving the chamber after voting no.
Vice President Pence presided over the final passage vote. GOP senators, who stayed on the Senate floor until the vote closed after midnight, broke out into applause after Pence announced the bill had passed.
“This is a great day for the country,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellTop GOP senators say they have the votes to pass tax bill Angus King on GOP tax push: ‘To call this a circus would be an insult to circuses’ McConnell works to salvage tax bill MORE (R-Ky.) said during a 2 a.m. press conference after the vote.
“We have an opportunity now to make America more competitive, to keep jobs from being shipped off shore and to provide substantial relief for the middle class.”
Corker, who is retiring after 2018, said in a statement ahead of the vote that he “wanted to get to yes” on the tax plan.
“But at the end of the day, I am not able to cast aside my fiscal concerns and vote for legislation that I believe, based on the information I currently have, could deepen the debt burden on future generations,” he said.
The bill would lower tax rates for individuals through 2025 and permanently cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. The bill’s tax cuts for individuals are temporary in order to comply with budget rules that the measure can’t add to the deficit after 10 years.
The bill would also repeal ObamaCare’s individual mandate, a priority for President Trump and many Republicans, and open up a section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for drilling.
Republican senators will now move to reconcile their legislation with the House’s proposal, passed in mid-November, as they try to get a final product to Trump’s desk by the end of the year.
The vote in the early morning hours of Saturday came after Trump met this week with key senators, including leadership and holdouts. Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, was also spotted outside of the Senate chamber in the hours leading up to Saturday’s vote.
McConnell had a narrow path to getting the bill through the upper chamber. With a 52-seat majority, he could only afford to lose two GOP senators and still let Pence break a tie.
But GOP leadership appeared confident on Friday that they would be able to pass the legislation after GOP Sens. Ron JohnsonRonald (Ron) Harold JohnsonGOP sets 23 percent deduction for small businesses to save tax bill Top GOP senators say they have the votes to pass tax bill Angus King on GOP tax push: ‘To call this a circus would be an insult to circuses’ MORE (Wis.) and Steve DainesSteven (Steve) David DainesTop GOP senators say they have the votes to pass tax bill Angus King on GOP tax push: ‘To call this a circus would be an insult to circuses’ GOP will sell out middle class for a win on tax ‘reform’ MORE (Mont.) came on board.
Johnson and Daines had been pressuring for a larger tax deduction for small-and-mid-sized businesses known as “pass throughs.”
Johnson noted that Republicans had been able to get the deduction percent increased from 17.4 to 23 percent and that he would be involved in further pass-through discussions as lawmakers work to get the bill to Trump’s desk.
“A seat at the table. Not just input. Not just consulting, but a seat at the table,” Johnson said when asked what leadership promised him in exchange for voting yes.
Passage of the tax plan became clear earlier Friday when Sen. Jeff FlakeJeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeSusan Collins is swing vote on tax bill Top GOP senators say they have the votes to pass tax bill Angus King on GOP tax push: ‘To call this a circus would be an insult to circuses’ MORE (R-Ariz.) gave leadership their 50th vote for the plan.
The Arizona Republican, who is retiring after 2018, said that in addition to getting rid of a “budget gimmick” relating to the full expensing of capital investments that he had also gotten a commitment on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Sen. Susan CollinsSusan Margaret CollinsSusan Collins is swing vote on tax bill Top GOP senators say they have the votes to pass tax bill GOP will sell out middle class for a win on tax ‘reform’ MORE (R-Maine), a moderate who voted against the GOP’s ObamaCare repeal efforts, also voted in favor of the tax bill after getting several of her amendments into the bill, including the restoration of a $10,000 deduction for property taxes and a lower threshold for deducting medical expenses.
“I will cast my vote in support of the Senate tax reform bill. As revised, this bill will provide much-needed tax relief and simplification for lower- and middle-income families, while spurring the creation of good jobs and greater economic growth,” Collins said.
To pay for the last-minute changes, Republicans made changes including restoring the alternative minimum tax in the bill, but raising the exemption amounts, and increasing rates for the repatriation of foreign earnings currently held overseas.
But passage of the Senate legislation wasn’t without drama. Republicans haggled over the details of the bill and key provisions remained unfinished in the hours leading up to the final passage vote.
And the bill seemed to be on the brink of defeat after deficit hawks, led by Corker, appeared ready to send the legislation back to the Finance Committee as they tried to get a promise that the legislation wouldn’t increase the deficit.
Corker, Flake and Sen. James LankfordJames Paul LankfordGOP will sell out middle class for a win on tax ‘reform’ JCT says Senate tax bill will add T to deficits, even with growth GOP should reject the left’s pessimism and the deficit trigger MORE (R-Okla.) had pushed for a “trigger” that would spark automatic tax increases if the legislation didn’t meet economic growth forecasts. But they were told by the parliamentarian that it didn’t comply with the rules.
GOP leadership initially offered to include automatic tax increases, which sparked near immediate backlash from across the caucasus.
“It would have been counterproductive to the central objective of this legislation, which is bringing back jobs and economic growth,” Cruz said. “And after extended discussion with a number of senators a consensus emerged that we shouldn’t be raising taxes.”
Sen. Pat RobertsCharles (Pat) Patrick RobertsThe Hill’s Whip List: Where Republicans stand on Senate tax bill Tax reform and innovation – good news and a cloud Fight erupts over tax credit for ‘orphan’ disease drugs MORE (R-Kan.), asked about the plan, added that his colleagues should “just quit fooling around.”
In the end, Republicans dropped the tax hikes, arguing they were confident the legislation would boost the economy.
That’s despite the fact that the Joint Committee on Taxation said the version of the bill that passed the Finance Committee last month would cost about $1 trillion in its first decade after accounting for economic growth.
“I think most of us have made it pretty clear that just on looking at the analysis that was done in the most recent scoring we just think they’re way off in their analysis,” said Sen. Mike RoundsMarion (Mike) Michael RoundsManufacturers keep pressure on Ex-Im nominee Garrett The Hill’s Whip List: Where Republicans stand on Senate tax bill Key differences between the Senate and House tax plans MORE (R-S.D.). “It just doesn’t add up to us.”
Democrats warned that the bill would put a hole in the deficit, and mostly benefit wealthy individuals and businesses at the expense of the middle class.
“All of the claims that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will pay for themselves were not correct. It’s time for my Republican friends to admit their error and come clean with the American people,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles SchumerCharles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerGOP should reject the left’s pessimism and the deficit trigger Fallon: Trump’s empty seats photo probably reminded him of his inauguration Congress should represent Americans — not illegal aliens MORE (D-N.Y.).
Sen. Chris MurphyChristopher (Chris) Scott MurphyThe path forward for democrats starts with gun violence prevention Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers will prevent more senseless tragedies Despite assurances, only Trump stands between peace, nuclear war MORE (D-Conn.) tweeted out an image of a unicorn, writing: “Unicorns are real. Tupac is still alive. Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the rich shrinks the deficit.”
Democrats used the free-wheeling floor drama, known as vote-a-rama, to force Republicans to take politically tough votes even though it was clear the legislation would pass. They also criticized what they called a lack of transparency, with GOP leaders releasing amended legislation hours before the vote.
Still, a Democratic amendment did pass striking a provision that would have allowed colleges that don’t take federal funding to be exempt from an endowment tax. Democrats argued that the provision would have primarily benefited Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan.
Senators also rejected a push by GOP Sens. Marco RubioMarco Antonio RubioEconomy surges but voters focus elsewhere Senate GOP votes to begin debate on tax bill Overnight Finance: Senate votes to begin debate on tax bill | Trump opens GOP eyes on reform | Republicans could punt funding fight to January | Yellen says national debt ‘should keep people awake at night’ MORE (Fla.) and Mike LeeMichael (Mike) Shumway LeeAmerican startups need surveillance reform Senate GOP votes to begin debate on tax bill Overnight Energy: Panel advances controversial Trump nominee | Ex-coal boss Blankenship to run for Senate | Dem commissioner joins energy regulator MORE (Utah) to make the child tax credit refundable to payroll taxes, and pay for it by raising the bill’s corporate tax rate from 20 percent to 20.94 percent.
But an amendment from Cruz to allow taxpayers to use funds from 529 plans for K-12 education, including home schooling, was added to the bill after Pence was called in to break a tie.
The House and Senate are expected to work out the differences in a conference committee in the coming weeks.
The bills differ in a number of ways. The House bill has four individual tax brackets with a top rate of 39.6 percent, while the Senate bill has seven brackets with a top rate of 38.5 percent. The corporate rate cut takes effect in 2018 in the House bill, but takes effect in 2019 in the Senate bill.
Other differences relate to the child tax credit, the estate tax, pass-through businesses and international tax provisions.
Updated: 2:25 a.m.
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